Nature | 20 February 2012
by Nicola Jones in Vancouver, Canada
IS THERE FEASIBLE road to a low-carbon future? According to a group of scientists, policy experts and young environmental leaders the answer is a qualified yes — if national governments and industry get busy developing and implementing transformative technologies to achieve a more sustainable supply of electricity.
The Equinox ‘blueprint’, released on 19 February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, British Columbia, is a summary of findings from the Waterloo Global Science Initiative, a summit conference held last June in Waterloo, Ontario.
Participants in the Equinox Summit spent four days “grilling” scientists about possible game-changing electricity technologies. “It was a very learned tire-kicking,” says Wilson da Silva, editor of Cosmos magazine and a facilitator for the group.
Summit participants settled on five pathways for action: large-scale storage for renewable energy, enhanced geothermal power, advanced nuclear power, off-grid electricity access and smart urbanization (including transportation solutions).
Summit participants settled on five pathways for action: large-scale storage for renewable energy, enhanced geothermal power, advanced nuclear power, off-grid electricity access and smart urbanization.
In the storage department, the group has thrown is support behind vanadium redox flow batteries — a kind of halfway technology between conventional batteries and fuel cells — for storing intermittent renewable-energy supplies and powering electric vehicles. These are more complex and bulky than standard batteries, but they have a greater capacity the larger they are, and don’t lose their charge over time.
For off-grid electricity access, the group picked organic photovoltaics as a probable winner — devices that are flexible, light and resilient, but that, so far, produce electricity at an efficiency of only about 8%, compared to about 15% for off-the-shelf silicon photovoltaic panels. Although these might be more expensive than diesel generators, they offer the huge benefit of ongoing power without effort or expense for, say, isolated villages in Africa.
For base-load power, the group threw a spotlight on geothermal power (they are calling for ten commercial-scale 50-megawatt demonstration projects to be built around the world), and advanced nuclear power (specifically, they hope for a demonstration Integral Fast Reactor to be built by 2020, and a thorium-accelerator-driven system by 2030).
Now the report has been released, the group is switching to implementation mode, trying to convince policy makers to take action. “Watch this space,” says Blackstock.
Some of the youth leaders have already taken the ideas back to their communities to make a difference, they note. Lauren Riga, just 27 years old, has been appointed director of environmental affairs and green urbanism for her city of Gary, Indiana, where she also now has a radio show on sustainability issues and advises the local power company. “It has been a life-changing experience,” she says of the Equinox Summit and report.
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